Ed Feser on The Philosopher

"How significant is Aristotle? Well, I wouldn't want to exaggerate, so let me put it this way: Abandoning Aristotelianism, as the founders of modern philosophy did, was the single greatest mistake ever made in the entire history of Western thought. More than any other intellectual factor . . . this abandonment has contributed to the civilizational crisis through which the West has been living for several centuries, and which has accelerated massively in the last century or so. It is implicated in the disintegration of confidence in the rational justifiability of morality and religious belief, in the widespread assumption that a scientific picture of human nature entails that free will is an illusion; in the belief that there is a "mind-body" problem and that the only scientifically and philosophically respectable solution to it is some version of materialism; in the proliferation of varieties of relativism and irrationalism, and also of scientism and hyper-rationalism; in the modern world's corrosive skepticism about the legitimacy of any authority, and the radical individualism and collectivism that have followed in its wake; and in the intellectual and practical depersonalization of man that all of this has entailed, and which has in turn led to mass murder on a scale unparalleled in human history."

--Edward Feser, The Last Superstition

An Epistemic Chance for Natural Selection

Maybe most people would still say they believe in God, if they had to answer a questionnaire. But if you have to ask people pointed questions for them to acknowledge belief in God, that's not serious conviction. It's the vestigial remains of their grandparents' religion.

--Redacted from Gordon Clark in 1952. A Christian View of Men and Things, Grand Rapids MI: Baker, 1981, page 13.

To Be Rather Than To Seem

"You must more than try, Mrs. Hudson. You must succeed."

--Sherlock Holmes

A Rose by Another Name

Philosophies that ignore the tendency toward self-contradiction in human nature do so at their own risk.

The Real Crash of 1929

"Human conduct and belief are now undergoing transformations profounder and more disturbing than any since the appearance of wealth and philosophy put an end to the traditional religion of the Greeks. It is the age of Socrates again: our moral life is threatened, and our intellectual life is quickened and enlarged, by the disintegration of ancient customs and beliefs. Everything is new and experimental in our ideas and our actions; nothing is established or certain any more. The rate, complexity, and variety of change in our time are without precedent, even in Periclean days; all forms about us are altered, from the tools that complicate our toil, and the wheels that whirl us restlessly about the earth, to the innovations in our sexual relationships, and the hard disillusionment of our souls. The passage from agriculture to industry, from the village to the town, and from the town to the city, has elevated science, debased art, liberated thought, ended monarchy and aristocracy, generated democracy and socialism, emancipated woman, disrupted marriage, broken down the old moral code, destroyed asceticism with luxuries, replaced Puritanism with Epicureanism, exalted excitement above content, made war less frequent and more terrible, taken from us many of our most cherished religious beliefs, and given us in exchange a mechanical and fatalistic philosophy of life. All things flow, and we are at a loss to find some mooring and stability in the flux."

--Will Durant, The Mansions of Philosophy: A Survey of Human Life and Destiny, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1929, pages vii-viii.

Forgotten Details of a Lost Universal

An objection I heard recently is that a good argument must contain premises that are more probable than their negations. But if one has two premises that are each 51% probable, then the conclusion can have only a 25.5% probability of being true.

It depends on whether the -probabilities- (technically, the underlying random variables) of the premises are in any way dependent on each other. Only if their probabilities are independent of each other would that calculation be correct.

If valid, the objection's argument would work against any two probability-independent premises including its own.

But the more basic question is how could one know the probabilities of -any- basic philosophical premise in the first place. What about the probabilities of the premises that imply the truth of that probability statement itself or the premises underlying any claims about the relation between a way of construing such probability and the existence of God.

The Guilty Conscience of Irrationalism

Disparaging the intellect always involves trying to justify the disparagement using an intellectual argument.

--Redacted from Gordon Clark, Religion, Reason, and Revelation, Nutley NJ: Craig Press, page 71.